# Re-watching My Fair Lady **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Tags:** movies\ **Created:** [October 9, 2023, 8:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/re-watching-my-fair-lady/991329 "2023-10-09T20:23:01Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2023, 9:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/re-watching-my-fair-lady/991329/21 "2023-10-10T09:33:10Z")
> [@Robot\_Arm](#): > > It’s interesting to read the description upthread of Shaw’s epilog to the original story, with Higgins’s life becoming disordered after Eliza left. Higgins has come to rely on Eliza, which may be as close to love as he’s capable. The above description kind of strayed from [what Shaw actually said](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3825/3825-h/3825-h.htm#act5) in several places, though. No, Eliza and Freddy did not move in with Higgins and the Colonel. No, Higgins’s life was not “disordered” when Eliza moved out to begin married life with Freddy. No, Shaw was not trying to imply in a discreet Victorian way that Higgins was homosexual. > [@](#): > > Eliza, in telling Higgins she would not marry him if he asked her, was not coquetting: she was announcing a well-considered decision. When a bachelor interests, and dominates, and teaches, and becomes important to a spinster, as Higgins with Eliza, she always, if she has character enough to be capable of it, considers very seriously indeed whether she will play for becoming that bachelor’s wife […] If she is at the end of her youth, and has no security for her livelihood, she will marry him because she must marry anybody who will provide for her. But at Eliza’s age a good-looking girl does not feel that pressure; she feels free to pick and choose. She is therefore guided by her instinct in the matter. Eliza’s instinct tells her not to marry Higgins. It does not tell her to give him up. It is not in the slightest doubt as to his remaining one of the strongest personal interests in her life. […] > > When Higgins excused his indifference to young women on the ground that they had an irresistible rival in his mother, he gave the clue to his inveterate old-bachelordom. The case is uncommon only to the extent that remarkable mothers are uncommon. If an imaginative boy has a sufficiently rich mother who has intelligence, personal grace, dignity of character without harshness, and a cultivated sense of the best art of her time to enable her to make her house beautiful, she sets a standard for him against which very few women can struggle, besides effecting for him a disengagement of his affections, his sense of beauty, and his idealism from his specifically sexual impulses. This makes him a standing puzzle to the huge number of uncultivated people who have been brought up in tasteless homes by commonplace or disagreeable parents, and to whom, consequently, literature, painting, sculpture, music, and affectionate personal relations come as modes of sex if they come at all. […] > > […] what is Eliza fairly sure to do when she is placed between Freddy and Higgins? […] There can be no doubt about the answer. Unless Freddy is biologically repulsive to her, and Higgins biologically attractive to a degree that overwhelms all her other instincts, she will, if she marries either of them, marry Freddy. > > And that is just what Eliza did. > > Complications ensued; but they were economic, not romantic. Freddy had no money and no occupation. […] > > Thus Freddy and Eliza, now Mr. and Mrs. Eynsford Hill, would have spent a penniless honeymoon but for a wedding present of 500 pounds from the Colonel to Eliza. […] Still, 500 pounds will not last two young people for ever; and they both knew, and Eliza felt as well, that they must shift for themselves in the end. She could quarter herself on Wimpole Street because it had come to be her home; but she was quite aware that she ought not to quarter Freddy there, and that it would not be good for his character if she did. […] > > Not that the Wimpole Street bachelors objected. When she consulted them, Higgins declined to be bothered about her housing problem when that solution was so simple. Eliza’s desire to have Freddy in the house with her seemed of no more importance than if she had wanted an extra piece of bedroom furniture. Pleas as to Freddy’s character, and the moral obligation on him to earn his own living, were lost on Higgins. […] > > It was the Colonel who finally solved the problem, which had cost him much perplexed cogitation. He one day asked Eliza, rather shyly, whether she had quite given up her notion of keeping a flower shop. […] They broke the matter to Higgins that evening. The sole comment vouchsafed by him very nearly led to a serious quarrel with Eliza. It was to the effect that she would have in Freddy an ideal errand boy. > > Freddy himself was next sounded on the subject. He said he had been thinking of a shop himself; though it had presented itself to his pennilessness as a small place in which Eliza should sell tobacco at one counter whilst he sold newspapers at the opposite one. But he agreed that it would be extraordinarily jolly to go early every morning with Eliza to Covent Garden and buy flowers on the scene of their first meeting: a sentiment which earned him many kisses from his wife. […] > > The shop is in the arcade of a railway station not very far from the Victoria and Albert Museum; and if you live in that neighborhood you may go there any day and buy a buttonhole from Eliza. > > Now here is a last opportunity for romance. Would you not like to be assured that the shop was an immense success, thanks to Eliza’s charms and her early business experience in Covent Garden? Alas! the truth is the truth: the shop did not pay for a long time, simply because Eliza and her Freddy did not know how to keep it. […] > > On the piteous spectacle of the pair spending their evenings in shorthand schools and polytechnic classes, learning bookkeeping and typewriting with incipient junior clerks, male and female, from the elementary schools, let me not dwell. […] > > At last they gave it up as hopeless, and shook the dust of the shorthand schools, and the polytechnics, and the London School of Economics from their feet for ever. Besides, the business was in some mysterious way beginning to take care of itself. […] The Colonel, who had been compelled for some years to keep a sufficient sum on current account at his bankers to make up their deficits, found that the provision was unnecessary: the young people were prospering. It is true that there was not quite fair play between them and their competitors in trade. Their week-ends in the country cost them nothing, and saved them the price of their Sunday dinners; for the motor car was the Colonel’s; and he and Higgins paid the hotel bills. […] > > That is all. That is how it has turned out. It is astonishing how much Eliza still manages to meddle in the housekeeping at Wimpole Street in spite of the shop and her own family. […] She knows that Higgins does not need her, just as her father did not need her. The very scrupulousness with which he told her that day that he had become used to having her there, and dependent on her for all sorts of little services, and that he should miss her if she went away (it would never have occurred to Freddy or the Colonel to say anything of the sort) deepens her inner certainty that she is “no more to him than them slippers”, yet she has a sense, too, that his indifference is deeper than the infatuation of commoner souls. She is immensely interested in him. […] But when it comes to business, to the life that she really leads as distinguished from the life of dreams and fancies, she likes Freddy and she likes the Colonel; and she does not like Higgins and Mr. Doolittle. Galatea never does quite like Pygmalion: his relation to her is too godlike to be altogether agreeable. ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2023, 10:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/re-watching-my-fair-lady/991329/22 "2023-10-10T10:14:19Z")
Note that the musical does refer to Shaw’s description of what happens to Eliza. ---
**Author:** ![DesertDog](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/desertdog/32/11503_2.png) [@DesertDog](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DesertDog)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2023, 3:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/re-watching-my-fair-lady/991329/23 "2023-10-10T15:49:35Z")
Linky no worky. ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2023, 4:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/re-watching-my-fair-lady/991329/24 "2023-10-10T16:27:29Z")
Here’s a better one. Watch from 1:30 [![](https://img.youtube.com/vi/CPhsR0T_cjA/maxresdefault.jpg "Rex Harrison — I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPhsR0T_cjA) ---
**Author:** ![slicedalone](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slicedalone/32/12515_2.png) [@slicedalone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/slicedalone)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2023, 4:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/re-watching-my-fair-lady/991329/25 "2023-10-10T16:58:36Z")
The highlight of my acting career came, as a 12-year-old in a day camp production of MY FAIR LADY, when I finished that song and the house went dark, and in the dark, I said my final line: “Liza?” When the house lights came back up, and “Liza” and I took our bows, I saw the mascara running down the cheeks of half the moms in the audience, making them look like so many Oedipus Rexes, and I thought “Holy Shit! I did that?” Lesson One in the Power of Art. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2023, 8:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/re-watching-my-fair-lady/991329/26 "2023-10-10T20:07:15Z")
> [@Robot\_Arm](#): > > The real closing line is almost a confession of Higgins’s helplessness without Eliza. Except that he got along fine without her for all the rest of his life. Also note that Higgins had several rather young and attractive upstairs maids. hmmm. ---
**Author:** ![Smapti](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/smapti/32/17938_2.png) [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2023, 8:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/re-watching-my-fair-lady/991329/27 "2023-10-11T08:48:07Z")
> [@Kimstu](#): > > Thus Freddy and Eliza, now Mr. and Mrs. Eynsford Hill, would have spent a penniless honeymoon but for a wedding present of 500 pounds from the Colonel to Eliza. As an aside, according to [this calculator on the Bank of England’s website](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator), that £500 in 1912 is the equivalent of about £47,000, or $58,000 USD, in today’s money. The Colonel was apparently quite a generous old coot. ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2023, 12:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/re-watching-my-fair-lady/991329/28 "2023-10-11T12:11:26Z")
Which shows my feeling that Eliza should be with the Colonel at the end. He’s the only one who treats her with kindness and consideration throughout. Cast a younger actor in the role and it would work perfectly. ---
**Author:** ![mbh](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/a6a055/32.png) [@mbh](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mbh)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2023, 2:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/re-watching-my-fair-lady/991329/29 "2023-10-11T14:45:44Z")
> [@RealityChuck](#): > > Cast a younger actor in the role and it would work perfectly. Nah, it’s a perfect May/December romance. When he drops dead, she will be a rich widow. Then she can marry Freddy, and everyone will be happy. ---
**Author:** ![Q.Q.Switcheroo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/q.q.switcheroo/32/5713_2.png) [@Q.Q.Switcheroo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Q.Q.Switcheroo)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2023, 5:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/re-watching-my-fair-lady/991329/30 "2023-10-11T17:59:40Z")
From today’s McSweeney’s: > **[I’m Eliza Doolittle, and I’ve Made a Huge Mistake](https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-eliza-doolittle-and-ive-made-a-huge-mistake)** > > As a British woman in the Edwardian era, I have to admit that at times I’ve been swept up in fantasies of Gilded Age splendor. Perhaps it was the a... ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2023, 7:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/re-watching-my-fair-lady/991329/31 "2023-10-11T19:41:33Z")
> [@Q.Q.Switcheroo](#): > > From today’s McSweeney’s: Interesting, thanks. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2023, 11:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/re-watching-my-fair-lady/991329/32 "2023-10-11T23:34:24Z")
The latest revival, from 2018 which we saw in Lincoln Center, had Eliza walk out on Higgins at the end, changing the sense of the original musical. Lots of justification for it in the program. It also had Pickering making goo-goo eyes at Higgins. The Pygmalion movie was British, so I wonder why Shaw went off at Hollywood about it. My reading of a collection of Shaw’s works, which had the above quoted letter, led me to think that Shaw knew about the “happy” ending which he accepted though not thrilled about. (A google confirms this.) So, the ambiguous ending got changed to a clear rejection of Higgins by Eliza. Yes, Higgins is rich. I’m not sure he inherited any money yet, since his mother, played by Rosemary Harris in the production we saw, is still alive and is an attendee at Ascot. I assume Higgins does not make his money from language lessons. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2023, 11:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/re-watching-my-fair-lady/991329/33 "2023-10-11T23:43:34Z")
> [@Roderick\_Femm](#): > > Listen to the lyrics of “Let a woman in your life” and tell me this is a man with no experience of women It sounds to me like a man whose **entire** experience of women is listening to complaints from his married or courting friends at “the club.” > [@RealityChuck](#): > > Note that the musical does refer to Shaw’s description of what happens to Eliza. Ah. I knew the song, but hadn’t read the play, so I didn’t realize that connection ---
**Author:** ![MrAtoz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@MrAtoz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrAtoz)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2023, 11:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/re-watching-my-fair-lady/991329/34 "2023-10-11T23:56:52Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > I assume Higgins does not make his money from language lessons. And yet, when they first meet, Pickering asks Higgins “Is there a living in that?” (“That” being phonetics.) Higgins replies “Oh, yes, quite a fat one.” So the implication is that yes, he does make a lot of money from his language expertise. Somehow. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2023, 12:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/re-watching-my-fair-lady/991329/35 "2023-10-12T00:26:36Z")
The implication is that he does for wealthy people who are embarrassed by their speech what he’s doing for Eliza for free - and since he’s an expert, he can prey on wealthy people’s insecurities so they think that his services are desperately needed ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2023, 12:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/re-watching-my-fair-lady/991329/36 "2023-10-12T00:40:40Z")
While a “confirmed bachelor” could be gay, he also could be a man who in his younger days was never quite satisfied both physically and intellectually by the woman he tried dating. Somewhere in middle age he decides that he never will be, so he gets his sexual satisfaction by visiting prostitutes (expensive ones, of course). Perhaps he gets his satisfaction from an upstairs maid that he hires telling her that he will pay her to sleep with him, for which she will get a very high salary. After a few years of working for him, the maid will have saved enough money that she and the confirmed bachelor decide that she can move on. The bachelor will then hire a new maid for this job. The maid have saved enough money that she can persuade a middle-class man to marry her, even though he understands what she has been doing for several years. ---
**Author:** ![Smapti](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/smapti/32/17938_2.png) [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2023, 12:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/re-watching-my-fair-lady/991329/37 "2023-10-12T00:56:54Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > While a “confirmed bachelor” could be gay, he also could be a man who in his younger days was never quite satisfied both physically and intellectually by the woman he tried dating. Another humorous aside; in my first playthrough of _Fallout: New Vegas_, I took the “Confirmed Bachelor” perk early in the game because the bonus damage against male humans sounded like a good idea since most of the enemies in the game are men, without realizing until **much** later in the playthrough that that perk gives your character the ability to flirt with men and pursue gay relationships. It definitely makes collecting on Santiago’s debt to the Garrets a lot more interesting, as you can talk him into working off his debt by becoming a prostitute. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2023, 1:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/re-watching-my-fair-lady/991329/38 "2023-10-12T01:01:04Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > woman he tried dating I meant “women he tried dating”. ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2023, 1:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/re-watching-my-fair-lady/991329/39 "2023-10-12T01:40:56Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > Yes, Higgins is rich. I’m not sure he inherited any money yet, since his mother, played by Rosemary Harris in the production we saw, is still alive and is an attendee at Ascot. But she’s a widow, IIRC. It would have been quite normal for a wealthy Victorian gentleman like the late Higgins Sr. to have left his widow a comfortable amount to live on while bequeathing most of his fortune to his son(s). ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2023, 1:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/re-watching-my-fair-lady/991329/40 "2023-10-12T01:49:07Z")
I’ll agree that’s possible, but plays from that period never seem to go into the tawdry details of the finances of the rich - unless the subject is how they are almost out of money. My reading of Higgins is that he is so set in his ways that he can’t handle the changes that letting a woman into his life would entail. Perhaps a bit like Shaw. The new version, by the way, really played up Higgins’ dismissal of Eliza having any part in her education and ability to pass as upper class. I’m sure this was in the original version, (I last saw it quite a while ago) but it was thrown in our faces. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/re-watching-my-fair-lady/991329.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/re-watching-my-fair-lady/991329.md?page=3)